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Consciousness trickled back to me slowly. Pressure around my wrists was the first thing that alarmingly alerted me when I tried to lift my arm and brush hair out of my face. I couldn’t. Something was weighing both my arms down. I curled my hands into a fist and tried again, but the pressure increased to match my struggles. Confusion wormed through my dull mind, and I fought to open my eyes.
Glaring bright light blinded me so I snapped my eyelids shut and groaned. The throbbing at the back of my skull was slowly letting itself know, and with it came a dry nausea that felt like something was forcing my throat open.
I was going to be sick. Fuck, I was going to be?—
A palm collided sharply with my face, causing my head to snap up and backward. My eyes flew open, burning from the bright light within the room, but the slap was more than enough to sharpen my senses immediately.
I was upright, restrained in a chair in a hotel room with spital blinds over the windows and a four-poster bed in the far corner. The muddy brown walls and tan carpet didn’t scream luxury, which was a surprise given the fact that Eli Talbot was seated in front of me.
“Eli?”
“About fucking time you woke up,” Eli snarled and he balled up his fist. Throwing the punch, it was angled toward my body, and a cold terror gripped me.
“Wait! I’m pregnant!” I screamed, trying to curl up in the chair to protect my body.
Eli paused, his fist a few inches away from my body and then he laughed. It was a cold, dry sound like a gust through a brown paper bag. “Are you really?”
“Yes,” I gasped, tears brimming in my eyes. “I am. Please, please don’t… please.”
“Well ain’t that just the fucking cherry on the fucking cake.” Something was holding Eli back from following through with the punch. I didn’t expect him to have so much respect for me in that regard, but even cruel men like him seemed to have their limits.
“I don’t understand. What am I doing here? What are you even doing?”
“Me?!” Eli stood so fast that he knocked his own chair backward. It clattered down, and he kicked it aggressively out of the way. “You’ve got a lot of cheek daring to ask me that when you’re the one that screwed me over, you little bitch!”
“What?” Shit, what did I do? I didn’t do anything, did I? Did he find the letter to Sawyer?
“Don’t try to act all innocent!” Eli was on me in seconds, fisting his hand into my hair and dragging my head so far back that my throat pulled tight. My breathing became hoarse when he clamped his other hand over my jaw and pinched into the joint.
“You fucking little snake. Not just the dumb pretty face you like to act on, are you?”
“Please,” I sobbed weakly past his grip. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do!” He roared down at me, flecks of spit burning into my skin. His grip tightened so harshly that for a second, I feared he was about to pop my jaw right out of its socket.
“Please—”
“My patent got rejected. Did you know that? Did you have a laugh about it with the men you’re fucking? Was it all just some big fucking joke to you? Well, let me tell you, by the time I’m done destroying your life, I will be the one laughing!”
“I have— no idea what you’re talking about!” Forcing the words out around my desperate gasps for air, I stared up into his hateful eyes and whimpered.
Eli snarled and released me. My head fell forward, chin to chest, while I wept.
“It turns out you stole some old fucking design that Sawyer had already shelved after Kane pointed out the similarities on it to an old project belonging to someone else,” Eli spat. “He took great pleasure in telling me that last night!”
Eli stalked around the room in front of me, repeatedly dragging his hand through his hair.
“So now PRISM looks like a fool for trying to sue with an old design that they didn’t even use, and I’m facing a lawsuit of our own from the real manufacturer behind the design you stole. Do you have any idea the level of damage you’ve done?!”
He ended up screaming in my face and his palm collided with my face once more.
“Please,” I gasped as a copper tang sprayed through the inside of my mouth. “I didn’t know. I stole what you asked me to steal. I didn’t know it was the wrong one!”
“I don’t believe you!” Eli curled his fists into the front of my shirt and hauled me upward, chair and all. The bindings around my wrists and ankles bit into my flesh from the weight of the chair, and I sobbed harder.
“Where is it?!”
“I don’t have it! I don’t have it, please. I don’t know where it is, I don’t know what you need, please I’m sorry. Please, please!”
